A growing trend in the beer industry has been the appearance of nanobrewers, small batch breweries that produce only a few barrels of beer annually, and far less than the 15,000 barrel limit past which a company is no longer considered a microbrewer. The folks who own and operate these boutique breweries must often keep their day jobs in order to pay their bills as their sales volume is often not enough to or just barely meets their operating costs. These nanobrewers typically distribute in a very small, local market, but given the ticker climate prevalent in today’s beer scene, their beers are often consumed, and reviewed, thousands of miles from their official area of distribution via the ticker, beer trading underground. The beer produced by these nanobreweries run the gamut of being downright excellent to drain pour material, and debates about their quality often hinge on the locals acting as boosters, while those with palates they believe are more refined will often raise a questioning eyebrow, if for no other reason than the query, “How can this IT-guy-by-day possibly brew beer as good as the homers are making it out to be?” Nevertheless, nanobrewers are here to stay and will grow for a number of reasons, including the “eat local, drink local” slow food movement, the never-ending thirst of far-flung tickers to acquire the latest and greatest beers (in other words, limited or hard to find, regardless of how the beer actually tastes), and support of small businesses verses the larger, corporate behemoths. The following is a sampling of some of the nanobreweries in the New England area, although some might not categorize themselves as such:
- White Birch
- Lawson’s Finest Liquids
- Maine Beer Company
- Prodigal Brewing
- Hill Farmstead
The last one on the list, Hill Farmstead, is not yet in production (nor is Prodigal), but Shaun Hill, owner and brewer, hopes to have his wares hit the shelves by Memorial Day, as detailed here. Shaun has brewed at a few breweries in Vermont, as well as serving a guest stint over in Denmark for almost two years. He has recently returned home to his native Vermont to work the family plot in order to conduct his alchemical brewing experiments. In the following video, Shaun elucidates some of the finer points of a Russian Imperial Stout at Norrebro:
No doubt this barrel aged Russian Imperial Sotut is a harbinger of things to come from Hill Farmstead.
Now, just what in the hell is a picobrewery?
